‘Day in Court’, ‘Winchell-Mahoney Time,’ Du Mont Shows: Not to Be
Seen Again

By ROGER M. GRACE

It is possible to
“return to yesteryear” by viewing, in the wee hours of the morning,
installments of “What’s My Line?,” “I’ve Got a Secret,” and other
Goodson-Todman panel quiz shows, broadcast on the Game Show network. Is there a
prospect of “Traffic
Court,”
“Day in Court,” and “Accused” similarly resurfacing, perhaps on Court TV or
TVLand?

No chance at all, the
shows’ star, retired UCLA law professor Edgar Allan Jones Jr., told me. He said
of the videotaped episodes of four decades past:

“There aren’t any.”

Thirty days after a tape
was aired, he explained, “they wiped it.” This was at the direction of the
show’s producer, Selig J. Seligman, Jones said.

“I had a running
argument with Seligman, which I lost,” he related.

Jones recounted offering
to buy the tapes, but to no avail.

He speculated that
Seligman wanted to preclude ABC from saving money by re-running episodes,
rather than paying full price for new ones.

“I had a nice rerun
commitment,” the educator noted. His contract specified that if an episode were
rebroadcast, he’d get three-quarters of the original stipend.

By recording over each
show, the producer frustrated the enjoyment of that contracted-for benefit.

Jones reported that a UCLA Law School colleague, Melville
Nimmer (the expert on copyrights, who died in 1985) advised him years later
that “it could be you had a cause of action to prevent” the erasures.

But, he said, he just
never had any thought of suing.

This is reminiscent of what Metromedia did
to Paul Winchell (oh, and to Jerry Mahoney, too). That company owned KTTV,
Channel 11. The ventriloquist taped his “Winchell-Mahoney Time” at KTTV’s
studio at Metromedia
Square, at
Sunset and Van Ness, in 1965. Under a contract, Winchell was to receive 50
percent of the proceeds from syndication. As it happened, however, at some
point that was never determined, Metromedia erased all of the videotapes of
Winchell’s shows.

Winchell’s production
company sued in 1976. Then-Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Alfred Margolis
granted judgment on the pleadings to Metromedia, and Winchell’s company
appealed. The Court of Appeal in Los Angeles, in an opinion by Justice Earl Johnson Jr.,
reversed. Johnson wrote that Metromedia’s “erasure of the videotapes deprived
appellant of the benefit of the bargain under the agreements with
Metromedia/KTTV, that is, rights to initiate future syndication of the show and
receive compensation therefor. This supplies facts necessary for a breach of
the implied covenant of fair dealing cause of action.”

In July, 1986, a jury
awarded Winchell’s company $17.8 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

There are virtually no
Du Mont kinescopes
in existence. The same mentality that led to erasure of the Winchell-Mahoney
tapes caused destruction of early TV gems aired live, but preserved on film for
viewing in areas not hooked up by cable.

Actress Edie Adams,
speaking at a 1996 hearing conducted by a panel of the Library of Congress,
told what she discovered in trying to track down kinescopes of shows starring
her late husband, Ernie Kovacs:

“I don’t know what
happened to the CBS shows, but have recently learned what happened to the Du
Mont shows. That’s the early Jackie Gleason Shows, including the original
Honeymooners, Captain Midnight, and the Kovacs Specials. Well, they were taken
care of in a most unique and swift fashion.

“In the earlier ’70s,
the Du Mont network was being bought by another company, and the lawyers were
in heavy negotiation as to who would be responsible for the library of the Du
Mont shows currently being stored at the facility, who would bear the expense
of storing them in a temperature controlled facility, take care of the
copyright renewal, et cetera.

“One of the lawyers
doing the bargaining said that he could ‘take care of it’ in a ‘fair manner,’
and he did take care of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge
semis back up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored kinescopes
and 2-inch videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them
out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the
Upper New York Bay.

“Very neat. No problem.”

Also, in about 1958, the
company that had been the Du Mont network intentionally destroyed many
kinescopes in the process of salvaging silver from them.

On the other hand,
black-and-white episodes of “Night Court” with Jay Jostyn are extant, and
available, for a fee, over the Internet. More about that show next week.